the ramble dump

I've been clearing out my room ready to head off to Uni. These sort of diggings always unearth some interesting, forgotten old stuff, although having done this before and stored many things away for safekeeping in a myriad collection of files and folders already, there wasn't really much left to find this time around. But I did find this thing, which I guess is a sort of sequel to this:



Kind of appropriate, considering I just fired up the old PlayStation to play Tekken 3.

Also, this:



I've been singing it. I think I remember it now.

Labels: fat men in tweed, sketches and doodles, tekken, videogames

# posted by Chris @ 4:18 PM 0 comments

The Aberration Chapter 7.

Amelia really does have that many notebooks. I've never seen them myself, but she has mentioned them more than once. She has lots for all different kinds of things and thoughts and ideas. I wonder if you could assemble all the contents of her brain with those notebooks, like a sort of psychological biography with a split personality. I know that the black one is for Starcustard. I am sure at least one of them contains a list of the children she has yet to eat.

She is not here right now, so I can get away with saying these things for at least another eighteen months.

Underneath that Sherlock Holmes reference is a considerable amount of truth. I lack the notebooks of both fictional and factual Amelias, but the same sort of process goes on in my brain when I'm trying to write a story. Things like sciencing and philosophising and most probably detectiving too all require very analytical approaches to be of much use. Storytelling, however, is the opposite. You can get ideas from all over the place, and while they might all share the same theme or have something in common, you're still left with the task of making something coherent out of what is essentially arbitrary. Whatever reason you might have for including something, whether as a plot device or to represent something or just because you thought it'd be cool to throw in, they're still only there because you put them there.¹ There is therefore a great deal of Detective Muse's making stuff up as you go along.

As I've mentioned before, The Aberration has been a continuous struggle to try and achieve this. I started off with a couple of Halo parody characters, included a few more things just because I thought they were interesting enough, and then over the years the story has repeatedly run out of steam as I've tried to figure out where to go next or what relation any of it has to anything else. Its current form is very different from its earlier iterations, in which the aim was basically just to fill it with weird things, because I've got stuck and had to go back and change things constantly.

I've finally mapped out something that's a bit more coherent than it used to be, by mentally rearranging and adding to and editing the thing until it's formed something I can actually go somewhere with. But does all this arbitrariness, the fact that everything included is ultimately an arbitrary decision, mean that stories are empty? Well, as tA has shown, there's actually a limit to how arbitrary everything can be before it falls apart. It has to have some coherence, and even if the story works by its own internal logic or requires some suspension of disbelief, the logic still has to be there, and any kind of sustainable logic has to be based at least in part on reality.

Fictional stories are, for the most part, contrived. And creating the illusion that these things aren't arbitrary is all part of the craft. But reality plays its part, and the further a story drifts from it, the less believable it will be. This doesn't mean you can't include fantastical elements in your world's internal logic, and as Holmes points out and Detective Muse echoes in this chapter, improbability is not the same thing as impossibility. But that internal logic needs to be solid.

So where does this leave the meaningfulness of a story, beyond its entertainment value or simple emotional engagement? That internal logic, however sustainable or believable it might be, could still be considered arbitrary. Can you use a story to analyse or demonstrate something? Can you show, say, the personal, social or political consequences of certain circumstances being brought about? Or present a moral lesson or a warning? You can't scientifically analyse a work of fiction any more than you can analyse a dream (albeit a slightly more focused dream). But if the logic behind the story is reasonable enough, you can suggest. You, as the author, can throw light on an alternative interpretation; your interpretation. Conclusions drawn from a writer's own fictional world -- by the writer and reader -- can never be truly objective, but they can offer some balance of thoughts and ideas. In the end, you can't really conclude anything with a story. They can only offer questions. They can offer a new perspective, one that will always be open to criticism but is not necessarily without its worth. That, to me, is part of what it's all about.

And, as in the case of tA, things like fat men in tweed or talking microwaves or a man dressed in a mutated sort of rabbit costume, even if they were included out of complete arbitrariness to start with, can still become something suggestive or figurative in the context of their function in the story. And who knows, maybe there was already some subconscious significance to them.

So Detective Muse has a point, even if Mr Holmes might disagree that it applies in entirely the same way to his profession. Don't diss the improbable, don't diss the ridiculous, and don't be too quick to diss the arbitrary.

¹ Which is why allegory can seem so manipulative.

Labels: allegory, fat men in tweed, halo, i am the ramblemaster, science, starcustard, the aberration

# posted by Chris @ 12:31 PM 0 comments

So, dragons.

Dragons like to do everything on a grand scale. Flamboyant, ambitious and perhaps a tad egotistical, they love to be the centre of attention. Or so it is according to the Chinese zodiac.

One day I'm going to create my own zodiac, probably, and those born on the exact date and the exact time as myself, with the same name and characteristics, will be the great ones. But for now, I'll stick with what we have, and with that, I'm probably more in line with my supposed Western sign, Scorpio.

But I noticed an interesting thing about dragons.

And, inevitably, it's to do with writing.

To come from a seemingly total otherdirection: why do I write?

No...that's too big a question for just yet. How do I write? Cinematically. This is something I've realised quite recently, especially during the bigger, more action-orientated events in a story. Even if it doesn't always turn out that way in the end, the approach is cinematic. I get an image in my mind's eye, sometimes a very specific image, literally looked at from a certain angle, and I try to put it into words. In City of Anarchy, there's Hermes being launched into the sky as a building explodes underneath him, for example; Chimaera in SciBoard Fiction forcing the snout of the shotgun into the top of the alien's head and firing; or vehicles being hurled into the air and thrown into buildings as the fat men in tweed pursue the Mini Cooper down the street in The Aberration.

But why do I write like this? To impress? To turn to the audience and go, 'Look what insane and spectacular stuff I can make happen!'

'Woah,' said the detective.

I think I'm guilty of this even more than I realise. I do tend, I'll admit, to get a bit carried away. When I first posted City of Anarchy I had people going 'Is this story going to give me nightmares?', and while I was staging a zombie versus pirate fight in SciBoard Resurrection, the climax of which was a hundred barrels of gunpowder and rum igniting and tearing the pirate ship apart, I was too busy having altogether too much fun with it to realise how over-the-top it was, and ended up having someone commenting, accompanied by a shocked-looking smiley, 'My dear God. Not afraid of spectacle, are you?'

So is that all it is? Spectacle? Am I some sort of literary showman, with trailers and posters and general enthusiasm, trying to gather an audience to witness this showcase, this freakshow, that I have brought before the public?

It's that dragon thing, in a way. Eccentricity and flamboyancy. Showing off. Being the centre of attention, which all writers love to be, even though some might pretend otherwise.

But then, while I'd be lying if I said I didn't take some delight in people responding with pop-eyed smilies when I present the absurd, the dark or the unusual, entertaining other people is actually a very small part of it. It's much more selfish than that. I do it to entertain myself.

Picture, if you will, a dark and eerily-lit laboratory. Its centrepiece is a large slab, upon which lies a dormant creature of freakish qualities; and somewhere to the right is I, the mad but nevertheless genius scientist, cackling maniacally and bringing down a giant lever with all my force. Impressive lightning effects ensue, and the monster becomes alive. I shriek with glee at that which I have created.

Enthusiasm, sometimes demented, is needed to bring ideas to life, whether it's being curious about or taking interest in some line of thought or image, or throwing yourself full-force into a concept or hypothetical world, either way exploring it and seeing what interesting things you can find.

This is why I write. This is what I love about writing. It can be figuring out a way of telling or presenting a story, through the way I use language and the way I construct different scenes and situations, or it can be examining what-if scenarios: what if there was a universe with giant slugs that wore wigs and slippers? What would happen if such an aspect of history was changed in this way? Fat men in tweed as seemingly inhuman, terrifying monsters...weird, eh?

Entertainment. Imagination. Perspective. Causality, history, humanity.

Exploring, experimenting, seeing what happens. Making something good out of it, and making something interesting.

Labels: boardfic, city of anarchy, excerpts, fat men in tweed, i am the ramblemaster, starcustard, the aberration

# posted by Chris @ 7:39 PM 0 comments

Some more old stuff relating to that Beef character. Once again, you may find it interesting, you probably won't.

Part 3: The Transadventural Romp

There was some overlapping with Bananas and Laxatives and the numerous short-lived and ill-fated stories begun in the second half of 2003 that I tried to put him in.

In the summer of '03, he featured alongside characters from various older stories in a pretty awful sequel to the original Agaffa called JunkJargon, but the less said about that the better, especially as it has no bearing on The Aberration whatsoever anyway.

The first story I began with Master Beef as the central character after B&L, and which could probably be counted as the real roots of The Aberration despite how different it is, was I Am The Superlativest! The original premise of the story was simply, a new story with Master Beef, and the same was true of most of the Beef stories leading up to TA. I had no clear plot in mind, but I wanted to have Master Beef in a new story where the quality was significantly improved from B&L.

Important trumpet tunes played in his head. As he stood proudly, hands on hips, on top of the hill, and his long ears flapping vigorously in the wind, he contemplated how great he was.

He was, in fact, Master Beef.

Another B&L character was also in it, now a real person.

'And he still thinks it's funny to make fart noises with a zip!' complained Tana. 'He's just hopeless!'

'Yeah,' said Mike, who wasn't really listening.

This isn't the same Mike, though. TA's Mike came from elsewhere, as I'll get on to later, and this is just pure coincidence. He was renamed Matt more or less straight after that was written, and was going to be part of a double-act with his pug dog, Glossy. They were crap characters, and I didn't use them again. But anyway...digression! My bane...

Still, he stood tall in his pink rabbit suit, the face cut out and replaced with a reflective visor. Admittedly, there was lots of lemon gum stuck in various places to add a decorative touch to his tatty pink coat, but he was still proud.

Much too proud.

The sun glinted off his visor, melting a nearby sheep.

And then began the build-up to this strange scene I'd had this idea for when I'd been writing down poem ideas...

'I mean, you can't even make fart noises with zips!' shrieked B'Tana.

'Mmm,' said Matt.

* * *

In the distance, several more sheep were tossed into the air. Beef ignored them.

* * *

'He's just so... so... infuriating!'

'Ah-hum.'

* * *

The ground underfoot started to shake violently.

And thus did the fat men in tweed enter Beef's world.

And then, apparently (according to the Big Orange File), I went in a completely different direction, and wrote a new opening scene.

'B?' called Beef. 'B?'

'What?' snapped B'Tana.

'Soup's ready!' Master Beef was immensly proud of his golden vegetable soup. Sure, it had odd, unidentifiable white bits floating around in it that were reminiscent of polystyrene, and it tasted, to put it mildly, like shit, but B'Tana always drank it all.

Beef made sure of that.

B sat down.

'D'you like it?' asked Beef.

'I haven't tried it yet!' said B'Tana, who had a million times before. She hated the stuff but it kept Beef happy, and Beef needed to be kept happy.

She lifted her spoon.

'Drink up!'

'Beef. I am doing!'

'Okie dokie.'

As she was watched closely, the spoon with the watery, green-golden liquid met her lips. Her facial features were suddenly horribly distorted. She spat it out.

'Too hot?'

'Something like that.'

'Blow on it.' Master Beef was always extremely eager to please. However, if he didn't he would have one of his 'tantrums', which were always best avoided.

Beef has rarely been creepier than he was here, the irresponsible and immature side to the B&L character blown up to new and scarily child-like proportions. There's quite a huge contrast between the enthusiastic, eager-to-please character here and the Master Beef of TA who is almost indifferent to the feelings of other characters (aside from Winnie). Fortunately, this horrific progression in Beef's character, which although did reappear later on, was soon stamped upon.

The next Beef-related thing that the BOF offers up is Beef the Artist. Now, this was something completely different again. What's written is a scene in which Beef stands in a white room and flings lots of paint at the walls, getting increasingly insane and violent with the paint all in the name of creation.

I have no idea what possessed me to introduce Beef to the world of art. The only other thing I had in mind for it was the single image of Beef standing on a high-up platform skirting the edge of either a gallery or some kind of big warehouse, clutching the work of art he was in the process of stealing: a porcelain woman.

Target: Gerber was the next story, never intended to be anything more than a short, but which featured Beef nevertheless.

Of course, where else would you find a fluorescent-coloured psychopath with a big, big gun? At a UK bookstore of course, always avoiding the tribes of Potter fans that prowled the isles.

Beef was idly browsing the music and biographies shelves in search for anything to do with the Beatles (he was a great fan), when he came across a small, green, hardback book. He was so disgusted that it was so small, green and hardback that he grabbed it from the shelf to see what it was looking so arrogant about. 'What are you looking so small, green and hardback about?' he demanded.

Barry Trotter and the Unnecessary Sequel

it replied.

This was where the character of Mike came from. The whole background story and how the character of Mike developed can be found here, so unusual that it deserved its own blogpost.

There is a third and final I Am The Superlativest! draft in the BOF, written shortly after the two seemingly random departures from it. It continues the theme of Beef's Beatles fandom that was put in place by Bananas and Laxatives 2 and Target: Gerber, and features another old B&L character.

Playing... 'The Beatles - I Am The Walrus.'

'Goo goo g'joob,' said Master Beef, accordingly.

'Juba juba!' insisted his eternally floating microwave, Salty Mark.

* * *

The fat men in tweed gathered around the one who was talking in a language of limited vocabulary which included the words 'blob', 'bloblob', and 'blobby', with the occasional 'blooby'.

...Don't ask me about that last paragraph. I really have no idea, except maybe a hazarded guess at it being the walrus himself whom they were talking to, or the return of the Crud from B&L. I honestly can't remember. Maybe it's best that way.

The last of this series of short-lived stories featuring Master Beef was Tales of Utter Normality: The Fat Men In Tweed. It was to be a story written for Kommingle, posted as a short prequel to a novel that was set in the same city, Galday Cringe (a name for a place I invented that has had many different incarnations itself), involving a character called Noreen.

The idea behind The Fat Men In Tweed was that the city had become infested with anthropomorphised rodents, and as a result the city was falling apart. A company called LoveTech had dispatched the fat men in tweed to destroy every rodent on sight. Of course, Master Beef's existence is now threatened because of his unusual attire...

The fat men in tweed, the Clean Sweepers™, had been given very vague orders. 'Eliminate anything under the description of a rodent, no exception.' LoveTech had fed them all the information they needed; all the statistics and descriptions. When they classified something a as a rodent, it was because what they had seen matched the descriptive data uploaded into them.

Just off the corner of Quitelong Street, after eliminating a squirrel problem on Djo Street, three tweedsters were looking keenly for their next victim. And before long, they'd found it...

* * *

Master Beef breathed in the foul-smelling air through his fur and sighed. It had been quite a quiet afternoon so far. In fact, it was too quiet. Disturbingly quiet. It wasn't the fact that the birds had stopped singing that worried him, oh no. They had all dropped silently to the ground years ago when the distinct stench of Galday Cringe finally got to them. It was something else.

Beef sighed, accurately guessing what it was. It was the absence of the screaming old ladies, the bunny bitch-fights, the exploding hamsters, the plod-plod of foot-apparel bearing Galdmonkeys, which he found oddly comforting. He sighed again. He was good at sighing, he decided.

* * *

The tweedsters analysed their prey, silently so as not to give it chance to escape.

Exessively long ears...check.
Hind feet larger than forefeet...check.
Intolerably fluffy...check.
Suspicious sniffing actions...ish.

...Locked onto target...

After that, I went back and wrote a final chapter for the original Bananas and Laxatives in what I'd hoped was improved quality for a message board. Then, in December 2003, I began another story...

The final part, Part 4, coming soon.

Labels: a history of development, excerpts, fat men in tweed, halo, i am the ramblemaster, the aberration

# posted by Chris @ 12:42 PM 0 comments

So why did I choose fatmanintweed.com? Where did the fat men in tweed come from? Such things would most suitably be answered in...

Part 2: The Fat Men In Tweed

So... there is this Tesco Value notepad I have, with only a few pages filled. On the first of these pages is a list of poems that never got written, bar one.

I'd walked in on my brother playing one of the Grand Theft Auto games on his laptop. The third one, I think. He was wreaking havoc with a rocket launcher in a cybercafé. I remember seeing a fat man flying up into the air. He may or may not have been wearing tweed.

I don't quite know what happened next. But then there was this idea for a poem. I'd been having lots of ideas for poems. Well, lots of images and concepts, that I liked, and wanted to make into poems.

There are seven ideas written on that first page. Only the first one got written. The third one says, Ten Fat Men in Tweed.

I'm standing on a hill. This is the image I had in my mind. I'm standing on a hill, the land vast and green and undulating all around me. And then, over the horizon, they come running at great speed. The narrative pays close attention to how they run, how their flab moves about, how the ground shakes. I start running.

Something something something something, the ten fat men in tweed. There was a rhythm to it. I remember that being part of the reason I liked it. It sounded good. It sounded like it would make a good poem. It rolled off the tongue. The Ten Fat Men in Tweed.

I never wrote the poem. But I liked the idea. It amused me. It intrigued me how you could make something like that so inhuman, and scarily powerful. How the hideous mass made it evil and repulsive. How this could all be processed in the mind, while accepting that they're wearing something as dull and down-to-earth as tweed. There was a novelty to this image, a weird paradox.

I liked it so much that the fat men in tweed ended up appearing in all sorts of places, in all sorts of forms.

ZimmaZoom™ flew across the conveyer belt, which was one of many in the massive network that ran throughout Tokyo. Of course, there were faster forms of transport: bean-shaped aircrafts flew around in the air above them, weaving their way through skyscraper tips (of which were neatly rounded as part of the Tokyo Sky-Safety Act of 2215).

Agaffa, Tokyo's notoriously grouchy elderly pensioner, sped up ZimmaZoom™ (zimmer frames were so outdated) and knocked over a dozen business people and a fat man in tweed. 'Muahaha!' she chuckled, patting her loyal machine. As Zimma (the name she gave it sometimes) slowed down, the conveyer belt passengers started to return to normal.

So Agaffa decided to reverse.

The fat man in tweed got his arm caught in the propellor in the back and he was spun round, making odd whimpers as he went.

-- From the drafts for the original Agaffa.

Not even evil horses could withstand such immense evil as this. It would break their backs and then poke their corpses mockingly. This evil: the Ten Fat Men In Tweed, forever drawn to the power of a new item of magical clothing: the Whatever Waistcoat. Tweed hats, jackets, trousers and black shoes so shiny you could see your reflection in them. Lord Winterseeson didn't know what he was getting himself into...

-- From The Pterry Board Epic.

Meanwhile, a hologram in the form of a portly man dressed in tweed appeared. He plodded over to the dead body which was sprawled untidily across the ground, sat down on it, and smoked his pipe. He had nothing to worry about.

-- From my GCSE English coursework.

As an image that still amuses me, fatmanintweed.com seemed only appropriate.

Labels: a history of development, agaffa, excerpts, fat men in tweed, i am the ramblemaster, the aberration, videogames

# posted by Chris @ 12:36 PM 0 comments